The once respected New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch has become notorious for its invective and bias against Israel, criticizing the Jewish state (and only the Jewish state) out of all proportion for any misdeeds it might have committed.

Now following the revelation that senior HRW staff traveled to Riyadh to solicit funds from rich Saudis associated with the regime, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lashed out at HRW for it hypocrisy and double standards.

As one writer in The Wall Street Journal put it: “A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners? No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW’s demonization of Israel.”

One of the most depressing aspects of current world politics is that Western human rights organizations have increasingly come to serve as a major propaganda tool for Arab terrorists and their supporters. Many ill-informed people who think of themselves as neutral (including news editors in New York, Paris and London) actually believe that groups like Amnesty International and HRW are reliable purveyors of news which present objective facts in a balanced way. As a result the mainstream media regularly cite them as a source of supposedly impartial data, as though what they said were self-evidently fair and true.

Meanwhile, a real human rights campaigner (rather than some of the phonies at HRW), Wajeha Al-Huweidar, has described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s largest women’s prison” in an article on the Arabic reformist website Minbar Al-Hiwar Wal-Ibra.